


Like Steel, Like Stone

by half_sleeping



Category: Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-03-31
Updated: 2012-03-31
Packaged: 2017-11-02 19:36:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/372614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/half_sleeping/pseuds/half_sleeping
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like stone. (An experiment of sorts.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The first time Joren could remember being- _ashamed_ of his father, of his family, was when Buchard came unexpectedly down to Corus on business and dropped in to see his son at training, and to take him out for treat; Joren knew he could expect an expensive present when he came up from sparring and Father was standing next to Lord Wyldon, smiling.

He had collected Zahir and Vinson and Garvey and strode over to them after, smug with excitement and pride. The training master granted Joren time off, but only Joren, still, he had wanted his father to meet his friends.

Buchard of Stone Mountain had looked through Zahir as though he was a commoner, a servant. And Zahir, proud Zahir who would look down his nose even at a fourth-year page who took to calling Joren pet girl-names, who fought almost as well as Joren himself and talked to his horse like a lady murmuring to kittens, had faltered, had looked to Joren, and Joren had looked away.

And then, face colouring, he had introduced Zahir loudly, and stared very hard at his father until he acknowledged it.

Later he’d apologized by shoving Zahir hard in the shoulder with his own, and Zahir responded by kicking him in the shin, but it had not quite ever been right afterwards, to hear _sand lice_ coming from the mouths of his uncles, and to skirt around talking of his friends at home.

 

_The chamber was supposed to be hard. This hard? But what was hard about this? About keeping your mouth shut, when there was nothing that could be said to change it?_


	2. Chapter 2

Small things had made up a mountain. It had started with Zahir, but moved on to a faint and vague disquiet in his stomach, the bruises on his cousin’s arms, the way that Vinson abruptly and suddenly ran out of jokes when Joren had said he was tired of his lies about whores, a myriad of small and unimportant things that added up to a desperately important whole. He was noble, he was heir to a great house- and that was all there was, surely, except that the more time he spent out of that house, the more he disliked returning to it.

Lord Wyldon was a conservative, and a hero, who stood against their ‘progress’-mad king, and _he_ was unlikely to succumb, and he never spat with impotent rage against a tax that was nothing to their great estate, never had to raise his voice to harry servants, was respected by all the realm alike.

He didn’t have to turn inward and rotten to be a bulwark against reckless winds of change, and he was the kind of man, Joren thought, that he himself would like to be. He bowed only under the greatest of pressures. And he would never, ever, break.

 

_Breath fogged in the air like imitating steam. What would knighthood be like? The fire and the glory- and the long hard slog. Greatness had to be taken. There was honour to be upheld._


	3. Chapter 3

The truly pitiful thing about the Lump was that she really could have been quite attractive, in the right clothes, with the right bearing, if she ever showed a damn emotion on her face. Mindelan were, of course, basically jumped-up merchants, but the general thinking was that jumped-up merchants who could negotiate successfully with notoriously prickly Yamani were jumped-up merchants worth marrying an extra son or so to. Not that there would be much left for her, after her much prettier sisters had taken, but surely there would be some giant of a younger son willing to handle  a bride who had already outgrown a mother who had outgrown her own husband, or a diplomat eager to take advantage of the fact that the Lump had Yamani ties thicker than her waist.

Instead, she dressed in Yamani kimono that made her look like a painted tree-trunk, and stared at men straight in the eye with the blank gaze of a fairly stupid rock. She only unbent a very little around animals as ugly and common as she was, and she practiced a savage’s weapon as though expecting at any minute to defend an attack on her virtue.

It was actually sort of depressing, to think of how unhappy her life would probably be: forced to settle for the worst dregs of noble blood, or unable to ever experience the joy of having her own family, unfeminine as she was, left to linger around the edges of the court and never, ever take.  

Ordinarily, being of the Crown Princess’s retinue would have been quite elevating, but obviously for Keladry of Mindelan, she’d started at the bottom of that heap straight off.

 

_Words chased themselves around in his head. It was deeds and not words that made a man. Deeds and not titles that made a noble. Words threatened to spill out of his mouth like sand from a cupped fist._


End file.
